Wednesday, July 23, 2014

You already know about Product, Support, Cost or a Geographic proximity related Competitive Advantages. You will most probably use the right advantages and value propositions while responding to a typical RFP. But there is a new kind of Competitive Advantage used by the large to medium organizations, and it is about Crowdsourcing the expert or niche inputs from outside of your company, just in time, and make your proposal stand out. Let’s elaborate using a walk through example.

You head the presales unit for a company, your primary source of new business is via responding to the RFPs from the clients around the world, who belong to diverse industries and domains & Geographies.

You receive one such RFP. The team does the initial analysis and comes up with the list of expertise needed to prepare winning proposal, along with the list of questions to be ask the RFP submitter.

Best way to have a competitive advantage is to be really good in the Industry and the domain this RFP belongs and also understand the requirement well. But there are two issues, one is the availability of right resources at your end, two you still might have only the high level understanding of the problem, industry and domain of this RFP.

The route most of the presales people follow in such a scenario is talk GENERIC, talk at HIGH LEVEL, talk what can be neither right nor wrong! Or still worst, just Copy/Paste from previous proposal. Only issue with such approach is there are too many vendors who will take this approach.

Instead, imagine, you have a vendor who can Securely and anonymously crowd source just in time expert inputs (Telephonic, Web, Email). With this newly acquired knowledge your proposal response or consulting deliverable would stand apart in terms of..

a) Localized industry & environmental know-how.
b) Knowledge of real issues and hence possible proposed solutions approaches.
c) Your confidence that you are on the same page with your client

We at ideaken help your company implement this approach and bring in noticeable increase in the quality of your RFP responses.

We have finished working on more than 120 projects, and have delivered increased success in consulting assignments and improved RFP win ratio by 5-25%.

Contact us to discuss our “Competitive Advantage” service for your company today.